Stealing Faces (35 page)

Dusk would arrive soon, and the desert would stir with the prowling of the sly and hungry things that waited for the close of day. They were all around him, even now. They were always there, and always waiting. Sharon Andrews had fallen to one of their number, as had Rebecca Morgan and the rest.

Ginnie too. Shepherd tightened his grip on the wheel, thinking of Timothy Fries with his rusty knife and his insanity.

His wife had fallen in the same kind of fight, victim of the same darkness.

Instincts and chemicals. If Cray was right, if that was all Ginnie had been—all any of them had been—then life was only accident and pain, and the predators had won already, and would always win.

But perhaps there was something more. Something not to be lost, even in the dark. Something a knife’s blade couldn’t take.

We have to believe,
 
Kaylie had said.

We have to believe.

Author's Note

My thanks to all the people who helped in the preparation and production of the original print edition of
 
Stealing Faces
, including Joseph Pittman, senior editor at
 
NAL
; Michaela Hamilton, associate publisher; Laurie
 
Parkin
, sales manager; Carolyn Nichols, executive director; Louise Burke, publisher; and my literary agent, Jane
 
Dystel
. Their support, feedback, and energetic assistance were invaluable in making the book a reality.

Readers are invited to visit my website at
 
www.michaelprescott.net
, where you’ll find information on my other books, as well as my email address, book reviews, and more. In a section called “Stuff that Got Cut,” you can read a scene I left out of
 
Stealing Faces
, detailing some additional unpleasantness at the Hawk Ridge Institute.

—Michael Prescott

Copyright © Douglas Borton, 1999

All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.